When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of
men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road
for an inrush of important and awakened souls. Having in mind to
get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one
Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with
high poetic genius. Or he had in many past lives so endowed
himself; and therefore the Law called him in. This evening I
shall work up to him, and try to tell you a few things about him,
some of which you may know already, but some of which may be new
to you.
What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of
activity--the one that preceded this present one--should have
begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, _of which we
know anything,_ began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we
may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony,
as the date of its inception. Our present European manvantara
began while Frederick II was forcing a road for civilization up
from the Moslem countries through Italy; we may take 1240 as a
central and convenient date. The first 390 years of it--from 1240
to 1632--saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in
Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal;
Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in
England. That will suggest to us that the Periclean was not the
first age of splendor in Europe in that former manvantara; it
will suggest how much we may have lost through the loss of all
records of cultural effort in northern and western Europe during
the four centuries that preceded Pericles. Of course we cannot
certainly say that there were such ages of splendor. But we shall
see presently that during every century since Pericles--during
the whole historical period--there has been an age of splendor
somewhere; and that these have followed each other with such
regularity, upon such a definite geographical and chronological
plan, that unless we accept the outworn conclusion that at a
certain time--about 500 B. C.--the nature of man and the laws of
nature and history underwent radical change, we shall have to
believe that the same thing had been going on--the recurrence of
ages of splendor--back into the unknown night of time. And that
geographical and chronological plan will show us that such ages
were going on in unknown Europe during the period we are speaking
of. In the manvantara 2980 to 1480 B.C., did the Western Laya
Center play the part in Europe, that the Southern one did in the
manvantara 870 B.C. to 630 A.D.? Was the Celtic Empire then,
what the roman Empire became in the later time? If so, their
history after the pralaya 1480 to 870 may have been akin to that
of the Latin, in this present cycle; no longer a united empire,
they may have achieved something comparable to the achievements
of France, Spain, and Italy in the later Middle Ages. At least we
hear the rumblings of their marches and the far shoutings of
their aimless victories until within a century or two of the
Christian era. Then, what was Italy like in the heyday of the
Etruscans, or under the Roman kings? The fall of Tarquin--an
Etruscan--was much more epochal, much more disastrous, than Livy
guessed. There were more than seven kings of Rome; and their era
was longer than from 753 to 716; and Rome--or perhaps the
Etruscan state of which it formed a part--was a much greater
power then, than for several centuries after their fall. The
great works they left are an indication. But only the vaguest
traditions of that time came down to Livy. The Celts sacked
Rome in 390 B.C., and all the records of the past were lost;
years of confusion followed; and a century and a half and
more before Roman history began to be written by Ennius in his
epic _Annales._ It was a break in history and blotting out of
the past; such as happened in China in 214 B.C., when the ancient
literature was burnt. Such things take place under the Law.
Race-memory may not go back beyond a certain time; there is a
law in Nature that keeps ancient history esoteric. As we
go forward, the horizon behind follows us. In the ages of
materialism and the low places of racial consciousness, that
horizon probably lies near to us; as you see least far on a
level plain. But as we draw nearer to esotericism, and attain
elevations nearer the spirit, it may recede; as the higher you
stand, the farther you see. Not so long ago, the world was but
six thousand years old in European estimation. But ever since
Theosophy has been making its fight to spiritualize human
consciousness, _pari passu_ the horizon of the past has been
pushed back by new and new discoveries.
What comes down to us from old Europe between its waking and the
age of Pericles? Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history
from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of
the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi
and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red
Branch and Fenian cycles. The actual tales as we get them were
no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late
recensions that we have. What will remain of England in the
memory of three or four thousand years hence? Unless this
Theosophical Movement shall have lifted human standards to the
point where that which has hitherto been esoteric may safely be
kept public, this much:--an echo only of what England has
produced of eternal truth;--something from Shakespeare; something
from Milton; and as much else in prose and poetry from the rest.
But all the literature of this and all past ages is and will then
still be in being; in the hidden libraries of the Guardians of
Esoteric Science, from which they loose fragments and hints on
the outer world as the occasion cyclically recurs, and as their
wisdom directs.
How do they loose such fragments of old inspiration? It may be by
putting some manuscript in the way of discovery; it may be by
raising up some man of genius who can read the old records on
inner planes, and reproduce in epic or drama something of a long
past splendor to kindle the minds of men anew. In that way Greece
was kindled. Troy fell, says H. P. Blavatsky, nearly five
thousand years ago. Now you will note that a European manvantara
began in 2980 B. C.; which is very nearly five thousand years
ago. And that this present European manvantara or major cycle was
lit up from a West Asian Cycle; from the Moors in Spain; from
Egypt through Sicily and Italy; and, in its greatest splendor;
when Constantinople fell, and refugees therefrom came to light
the Cinquecento in Italy. Now Constantinople is no great way from
Troy; and, by tradition, refugees came to Italy from Troy, once.
Was it they in part, who lit up that ancient European cycle of
from 2980 to 1480 B. C.?
In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come
down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that
ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean
age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were
probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of
the Celtic Age are to us. But Homer caught an echo and preserved
the atmosphere of it. As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the
Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style--which thing is the
impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its
expression;--so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a
sense of style to the later Greeks. It rings majestically through
his lines. His history is perhaps not actual history in any
recognizable shape.
Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest
genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message
through them; perhaps reinvented half of them. Even so Geoffrey
of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that
came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and
Spenser followed him in the _Faery Queen,_ Malory in his book,
and Tennyson in the _Idylls of the King._ Even in that last,
from the one poem _Morte D'Arthur_ we should get a sense of the
old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a
score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the
Idylls. But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser
and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic. How much more
of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek
of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled
with racial uplift.
Where did he live? Oh, Goodness knows! When? Goodness knows
again. (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.) We have
Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years
before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850;
and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as
possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not
Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one? At
such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a
little after; because they have a work of preparation to do;
and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and
aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other
sought to do for Greece. But this is to treat Homer as if he had
been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved'
(a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of
him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a
fiction. Admitted. A school of critics has cleaned poor old
blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on
God's earth--just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up
the Human Soul. But there is another school, who have preserved
for him some shreds at least of identity. Briefly put, you can
'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence--grammar,
microscopic examination of text and forms and so on--that Homer
is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious
of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into
account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave
and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad
does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities
between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally
speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master
made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as we know it, may contain
passages not his; but--_he wrote the Iliad._
What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now
let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.
Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an
interval, another? Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another. The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_ but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend. At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents. The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet. It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.
Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had
been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering
minstrels--Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they
were called--who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic
mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and
unculture. The first three orders were doubtless in existence
long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and
minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of
culture in any race during its pralayas. So you find the
professional story-tellers in the East today. But the Homeridae
may well have been--as De Quincey suggests--an order specially
trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single
school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer.
We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer--the works,
not the man--into continental Greece; importing them from Crete.
That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle
in Sparta. European continental Greece would in any case
have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture;
because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian
civilization. Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia
Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and
Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them
into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so
awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica,
Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.
Where did Homer live? Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over
the place. We know of the seven cities that claimed to be
his birthplace:
_Smyrna, Chias, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenae
Orbis de patria certat, Homere, Tua._
Of these Smyrna probably has the best chance of it; for he was
Maeonides, the son of Maeon, and Maeon was the son of Meles; and
the Maeon and the Meles are rivers by Smyrna. But De Quincey
makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better
than any other part of the world. Many of the legends he
records; many of the superstitions--to call them that;--many of
the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to
Crete. Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were
very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does
not figure greatly in their legends. But in Crete the friendship
of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses
still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they
do in Homer.
There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he
give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns;
exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times. He mentions the
_Kubizeteres,_ Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown
elsewhere. They perform in couples; and when he mentions them,
it is in the dual number. Preternatural voices are an Homeric
tradition: Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when
Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened.
In Crete such voices are said to be still common: shepherds
carry on conversations at incredible distances--speak to, and are
answered by, men not yet in sight.--Dequincey gives several other
such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very
convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to
the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, _alias_ Homer, must
have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;--say, was brought
up there.
Now Crete is much nearer Egypt than the rest of Greece is; and
may very likely have shared in a measure of Egyptian culture at
the very beginning of the European manvantara, and even before.
Of course, in past cycles it had been a great center of culture
itself; but that was long ago, and I am not speaking of it. In
the tenth century A.D., three hundred years before civilization,
in our own cycle, had made its way from the West Asian Moslem
world into Christendom, Sicily belonged to Egypt and shared in
its refinement--was Moslem and highly civilized, while Europe
was Christian and barbarous; later it became a main channel
through which Europe received enlightenment. May not Crete
have played a like part in ancient times? I mean, is it
not highly probable? May it not have been--as Sicily was
to be--a mainly European country under Egyptian influence,
and a seat of Egyptianized culture?
Let us, then, suppose Homer a Greek, born early in the ninth
century B.C., taken in childhood to Crete, and brought up there
in contact with cultural conditions higher than any that obtained
elsewhere among his own people.
But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep
enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and
culture, to wander forth among the islands singing.--
_En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi
Melpomen,_
says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi,
perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island
in the Cyclades.
He would have had some training, it is likely, as an Aoidos: a
good founding in the old stories which were their stock in trade,
and which all pointed to the past glory of his race. In Crete he
had seen the culture of the Egyptians; in Asia Minor, the
strength and culture of the Lydians; now in his wanderings
through the isles he saw the disunion and rudeness of the Greeks.
But the old traditions told him of a time when Greeks acted
together and were glorious: when they went against, and
overthrew, a great West Asian Power strong and cultured like the
Lydians and Egyptians. Why should not he create again the glory
that once was Greece?
_Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achileos!_
--Goddess, aid me to sing the wrath (and grandeur) of a Greek
hero!--Let the Muses help him, and he will remind his people of
an ancient greatness of their own: of a time when they were
united, and triumphed over these now so much stronger peoples!
So Dante, remembering ancient Rome, evoked out of the past and
future a vision of United Italy; so in the twelfth century a
hundred Welsh bards sand of Arthur.
I think he would have created out of his own imagination
the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans. It
does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition. Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself. Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it, by two conditions: what he saw of the life of
his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of
civilization in Egyptianized Crete. He was consciously picturing
the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more
cultured than his own. Floating legends would tell him much
of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.
Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.
How would he go to work? In this way, I think. The Greeks,
says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not,
as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous. Now what is strength
like, and civilization? Why, I have them before me here to
observe, here in Crete. But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a
Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown
among Greeks.--I do not mean that he consciously set this plan
before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that
he, or anyone, would follow. Civilization would have meant for
him Cretan civilization: the civilization he knew: that part of
the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness. But in his
conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire
to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the
Egyptianized culture he knew. So I think that the conditions of
life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination,
working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and
Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that. He made his people
essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features
drawn from civilized life.
One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances: tales from of
old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to
fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers. The bards
saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the
far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in
trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.
When they wrote of Cai--Sir Kay the Seneschal--that so subtle was
his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall
as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely
celtic element: the tradition of the greatness of, and the
magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set
him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were
simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans. Material culture,
as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.
Lying was traditionally a Greek vice. The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth. Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections. He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul. On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was. Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much
higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that
had been made by that time in general culture. Andromache, in
Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a
Greek, but Egyptian idea.
Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of
the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the
grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down
the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of
the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of
things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and
slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from
the background of his own day. Nor did Shakespeare, trying to
paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan
Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from
the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London
prentices, cobblers and the like. Learned Ben, on the other
hand, contrives in his _Sejanus_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and
sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and
clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson;
never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly. But Shakespeare
rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less
Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the
life, and from the life he saw about him. The deeper you see
into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter;
you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the
externals worry about themselves. Now Homer was a deal more
like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:
he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his
contemporaries. Men in those days, he says, were of huger
stature than they are now. And yet, when his imagination is not
actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero,
real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to
obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to
the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of
Hesiod's dismal picture.
Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his
songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just
now, "in the ancient sacred hymns." As Shakespeare was first an
actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on
his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old
hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker
of new ones. He saw the wretched condition of his people,
contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and
was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as
yoke-fellow with race-pride. You shall see presently how the
intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been
something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression: he had
seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to
fate no quality but cruelty. Impassioned by what we may call
patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for
Greek epic: the story of a Greek contest with and victory over
West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West
Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and
Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth
the hand of the great enemy, fate. In different moods and at
different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a
large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.
And the Odyssey? Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his
old age. Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and
many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and
there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all. Someone
says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than
from that of Homer. I do not know. It is a better story than
the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind. Yet
it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are
discrepant and incompatible parts.
There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed
down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the
Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the
verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so
preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But
I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to
imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me
Homer must have written or dictated them at first. Writing in
Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times. It is
now, anywhere, to illiterates. In Caesar's day, as he tells us,
it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but
the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in
general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me,
certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services
to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the
Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the
first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to
remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost
and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of
writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since
Lemurian days. When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a
poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine
Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he
chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.
Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer? What
can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the
picture I have attempted to make? Very little; yet perhaps
something. I think his historical importance is greater, for us
now, than his literary importance. I doubt you shall find in him
as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the
hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example. I doubt he was
an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious
mind the truths that make men free. Plato did not altogether
approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not
fear to follow. I think the great Master-Poets of the world have
been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they
presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul. I believe
that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that
therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated. He
pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation: his fame is
chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and
use their hats for speaking-trumpets. We have in English no
approximately decent translation of him. Someone said that Pope
served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince
was moved to cry: "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful
and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in
intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true
respect. Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of
Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would
loathe Homer. Pope held that water should manifest, so to say,
through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to
be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer. Homer was more
familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the
yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands. Which
pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous
sea-epithet: the thunder-on-the-precipices of
_poluphloisboio thalasses,_
or the lisping-on-the-sands of
_ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_
(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates
of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to
Mr. Pope.
As to his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what
Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct
and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but
noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque
periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but
he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly,
clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation
often by long similes.) And he either made a language for
himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous
as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom
Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect. Newman
had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that
it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's
side. Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary
virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to
certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity,
designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read
Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a
critic, saw things sometimes. _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says
Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was
the product of a great creative force; which did not however
work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say is
merely a bearing out of this.
First there is his poverty of epithets. He repeats the same ones
over and over again. He can hardly mention Hector without
calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering-
helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_--
"of Hector the tamer of war-steeds." Over and over again we have
_anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and
over again is the sea _poluphloisbois-terous,_ as if he could say
nothing new about it. Having discovered one resounding phrase
that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just
content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his
imagination as to flash some new revelation on it. As if Hamlet
should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet
as "the hesitating Dane."...... But think how the Myriad-minded
One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up
new revelatory figures and epithets about everything: how he
could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough
hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human
lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous
burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but
pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour
you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have
said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it
all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to
Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer,
with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.
Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you
a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:
_Ten d'apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?_
--Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But
no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted
Hector;" or _tout simplement,_ 'Hector answered.' And hardly can
anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some
variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:
_Ton d'emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon.
Hos phato. Ten d'outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus_
--whereafter at seven lines down we get again:
_Ten de meg' ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;_
--in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and
unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no
adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators,
whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will
remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has
fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme
thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest
over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always
some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So
he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and
so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's--would
still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel-
values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the
Soul and the Eternal.
Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true
that his reputation gains on the principle of _Omne ignotum pro
magnifico_--because he is unknown to most that praise him--let
none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His
faults--to call them that--are such as you would expect from his
age, race, and peculiar historic position; his virtues are
drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from
the Unfathomable that flowed through him. He had the high
serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them
highly, deeply and seriously. We may compare him to Dante: who
also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with
a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more: a
purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.
Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important
poetical monument existing." Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry
would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.
But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a
less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante,
Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe--to name only poets
of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul-
symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.
Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism. If there is paucity
of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his
surgery. I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the
Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was
dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way. Now Poetry
essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations
are with the Soul.
"From Homer and Polygnotus," says Goethe, "I daily learn more
and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly
speaking, to enact Hell." A truth, so far as it goes: this
Earth is hell; there is no hell, says H.P. Blavatsky, but a man-
bearing planet. But we demand of the greatest, that they shall
see beyond hell into Heaven. Homer achieves his grandeur
oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human
fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the
bright Reality. Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy,
Helen says:
"Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders,
Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus--
Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved
Lacedaimon?
Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound
through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?"
And then:
_Hos phato. Tous d'ede kalechen phusizoos aia,
En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie._
"--So spake she; but they long since under Earth were
reposing
There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon."
[From Dr. Hawtrey's translation, quoted by
Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]
There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry
about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that
strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner. Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:
"Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them: the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."
You hear the high pride and pathos in that. To be a poet, he
says: to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing: is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate. It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner. The pride is lacking quite: the intuition for a
divinity within man. But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate: even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down. Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said: "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses." How different the note of Milton:
"Those other two, equal with me in fate,
So were I equal with them in renown--"
or:
"Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and by dangers compassed round."
And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows
of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been
astonished at fate's presumption.
We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:
_Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--
"Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"
_Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
Zoein achnumenous. Autoi de l'akedees eisin_--
"The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."
Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense;
there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty
resignation. As if he said: We are miserable; there is nothing
else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss
about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth
hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in
these cases his grand manner. His attitude is, I think, nearer
the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons,
were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night. But he
and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did
not. His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past
glory beyond the nightfall.
But where does this Homeric mood lead us? To no height of truth,
I think. Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature
of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the
life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be
Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the
Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is
Joy." Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the
veil that hides it. God knows we see enough of the veil; but
the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show
the brightness which it hides. If the personality were all, and
a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave;
then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in
all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses
of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as
something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of
a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little
incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is
understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur
the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon
its true path and mission.
I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad: the passion and
spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough
to let him see this outward world: personalities, with their
motive-springs of action within themselves: his greatness, his
sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he
lacked vision for the Meanings. I found him then less than
Shakespeare: whose clear knowledge of human personalities--
ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument;
who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set
forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma,
and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the
triumph of the soul, the Magician, in _The Tempest._ And I count
him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to
justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of
fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the
Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not
yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior
to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;--I count
him less than the "Evening Dragon" of _Samson Agonistes,_ whose
last word to us is
"Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."
And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose
words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his
journey
.... _pei dolci pomi
Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
Ma fino al centro pria convien ch'io tomi:_--
"to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my
true Leader; but first is"--convien--how shall you translate the
pride and resignation of that word?--"it behoves," we must say,
"it convenes"--"first it is convenient that I should fall as far
as to the center (of hell);"--who must end the gloom and terror
of that journey, that fall, with
_E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,_
"And then we came forth to behold again the Stars;" and who came
from his ascent through purifying Purgatory with
_Rifatto si, come piante novelle
Rinnovellate di novella fronda,
Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle_--
"So made anew, like young plants in spring with fresh foliage, I
was pure and disposed to come forth among the Stars;"--and who
must end his _Paradiso_ and his life-work announcing
_L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,_
"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars." Ah, glory
to this Dante! Glory to the man who would end nothing but
with the stars!